Tag: Evil Bastards

What Woody Said

Big Brother, Surveillance Society

In one of his rare funny moments, Woody Allen once referred to people glued to their cell phones as “connectivity assholes”.  Here’s a story which, if true, provides ample proof of the pitfalls thereof:

Amazon reportedly shut down a customer’s smart home after the delivery driver claimed he heard a racial slur coming through the doorbell, even though no one was home. 

Brandon Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, came home on May 25 to find that he had been locked out of his Amazon Echo, which many devices, including his lights, are connected to.

Yeah… so much for that “convenience” that people are always bleating about when the discussion moves to “smart homes”, “self-drive cars” and all that similar nonsense.

So don’t complain when Big Tech, or Big Brother, or Biggus Dikkus turns off your lights, takes your house through “emininent domain” then bends you over the desk and gives it to you good and hard in your connectivity asshole.

Life Lesson

Gummint, Lies and Untruths

…well, not for me, nor for most of my Readers, but this story reminds us why we should never believe what the fucking government tells us:

Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.

The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who’ve deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.

So all that bullshit about “markets” and “bats” was just that:  weapons-grade

My trust in government was always on the low side, having grown up in a totalitarian society.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our own American government is, if anything, worse than that.

Trust nobody — and most especially, don’t trust anything the government tells you, when the likely outcome is that they can increase their control over us, with our consent.

Like I said:  a life lesson.

Different Universe, Part 17

Economics

The usual snow job on the economy:

The CPI report shows that inflation rose four percent from last May, which is less than half of what it was at its peak in 2022, when it hit 9.1 percent year-over-year in June. Economic forecasts had predicted inflation would come in at 4.1 percent, meaning that the current economic climate is doing better than expected.

Uh huh.  Considering that our “expectations” were of the Four Riders genre, that doesn’t mean much.  And it gets worse:

However, core CPI – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – rose 5.3 percent from last May, which is a far less-rosy picture of the state of the economy.

Yeah, I’m so glad that the first inflation “estimate” just happens to exclude the two categories which affect ordinary people’s lives the most.  And for the record, I’m still of the mind that the “5.3 percent” inflation rate is only about a third of what I’m seeing at the grocery store — i.e. 15 percent would be closer to the mark, which is about how much my closely-budgeted grocery spend has gone up in the past three months.

By the way: has anyone priced tires recently?  Holy shit.

When the history of this era comes to be written, one of the most egregious falsehoods to be exposed will be the “official” inflation rate.

Down The Toilet

Freaks & Loonies, Legal Stuff, Perverts

That’s what’s going to happen to this poor guy’s business:

A women’s spa, where nudity is compulsory, has been ordered by a judge to admit pre-op trans women with penises after an activist complained when the owner tried to ban them.

Of course, where else but in the Blue Northwest?

The family-owned spa, which has a branch on the outskirts of Seattle and one in Tacoma, is modeled on Jjimjilbang – sex-segregated bath houses in Korea – and offers monthly memberships and day passes.

Needless to say, real women — i.e. those without dangling bits — are probably going to stop frequenting this spa because they don’t want to see hairy penises in a girls-only haven, and the place will soon have to close.

All because some blue-haired trannie freak felt slighted.

In the old days… let me not go there.  On the other hand, why the hell not?

Plus Ça Change…

Marxists, QOTD

I’ve just finished re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower — which, if you haven’t read yet, I urge you to do so — and despite the fact that Tuchman was a tired old Lefty, she still was of an era where historians relied on facts, uncomfortable though they may be.  Unlike today’s crop of Newspeak toads, for whom the old adage “If the facts don’t conform with the theory, they must be eliminated” is carved into their stony little hearts.

Here’s one such fact, and it’s a quote of then-Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed (R-Maine), who said of the Progressives of his era:

It was true of Progressives back then, and it’s still more true of their philosophical descendants of today, whether politicians, Greens or the Gender Studies Brigade [some considerable overlap].

Seriously:  think of Guam “tipping over”, the “trillion-dollar coin”, “defunding the police”, “anthropomorphic climate change”, “ESG”, “patriarchal hegemony”, “DEI”, “Green New Deal” and all the other modernist, oh-so fashionable tropes and tell me that these “philosophies” (actually more like religions because they rely on belief rather than substance) are not doing today exactly what Reed ascribed to the mountebanks of his era.

Actually, today’s “progressive” tropes are even more antithetical to knowledge than before, because they insist on ignoring or worse, destroying the fundamentals of civilization’s accrued wisdom — because it’s obvious that it’s only without that wisdom that their policies can survive the first question or challenge.

Even worse, when the time comes to write the history of their many failures, the historians, being of the same tribe, will almost certainly lie and ascribe the causes thereof to “fascists”, “counterrevolutionaries” (an old Marxist standby), “revanchists”, “Trumpists” or whatever their fevered little imaginations can devise — anything other than admit to the inherent fallacies of their policies and the crashing, grinding failures and concomitant miseries caused thereby.

Even Tuchman would weep.

[stupidity erased because embarrassing]

Fixing The Mess

Media Assholes

I see that CNN has canned their CEO after only about a year on the job:

CNN CEO Chris Licht will be leaving the media company just 16 months after being picked for the position.

Licht announced Wednesday that he will be leaving CNN after meeting with Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. The 51-year-old CEO will be replaced in the interim by a three-person leadership team which includes longtime CNN executive Amy Entelis, who worked closely with former cable news boss Jeff Zucker before Zucker’s resignation in February of 2022.

“For a number of reasons things didn’t work out and that’s unfortunate,” Zaslav said. “It’s really unfortunate. And ultimately that’s on me. And I take full responsibility for that.”

Zaslav told employees that CNN is “in the process of conducting a wide search” for a new leader that could “take a while.”

I want this job.  Here’s how I see it working.

If CNN is serious about rebuilding its image and ratings, what better way to signal that change than by picking an avowed conservative (i.e. me) who will not become enthralled by blowjob pieces by the New York Times  and Atlantic Magazine?

My first pledge would be to make CNN’s principle business about actual news instead of opinion — all their talking heads would be fired on Day One of my tenure — and my job would be to make their ad line “This… is CNN”  something that doesn’t instantly cause mocking laughter and isn’t used as a punchline.

See this shit?

Politicians and media personalities from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Scarborough were angered by CNN’s decision to host Trump on the platform that has consistently offered friendly coverage to Democrats.

Gone.  I pledge to give unfriendly or at best skeptical coverage to everybody.  If that frightens off the Lefties, c’est la vie.  (For some reason, conservatives have no problem with this, as long as they are treated fairly — Tim Scott went on The View  recently, even.)

Sure, I know nothing about running a media company.  So what?  “Industry experience” doesn’t seem to have helped them very much in the recent past, has it?

I’d move all their New York offices to somewhere like Fort Worth, cutting the cord of the New Jersey Turnpike, so to speak, and okay, I’d make the sacrifice myself and relocate to Atlanta.

Oh, and by the way:  I’m cheap.  Best way to increase profits is to cut costs, most especially salaries (see “terminated talking heads”, above) and the best way to signal that is for the CEO to be the first to take a pay cut.  All media people are overpaid anyway.  And to those who would say that I’d be hiring cheap (ergo inferior) replacements, I would point out that the overpaid assholes they’ve currently got on staff have not exactly covered themselves with glory.

I’d be satisfied with a two-year contract at $12 million p.a., no shares or stock options (conflict of interest), with further annual extensions at $12 million each (because I don’t want to work there for too long lest I get cooties).

They could use one of these as my profile pic:

It would frighten all the right people, and please all those on the right.

To quote Roger Ailes:  “Half the market.”

What could CNN lose, any more than they’ve lost already?